A Rule to Avert Balloting Woes Adds to Them

By FORD FESSENDEN

Published: August 6, 2004

CHICAGO—
When poll workers could not find Kelly Pierce's name on the registration rolls during the primary here in March, they told him to take advantage of a new election rule that allowed him to cast his vote using a provisional ballot.

The rule is intended to prevent one of the major problems experienced in Florida during the 2000 presidential election, when scores of voters, especially minority voters, were turned away at the polls over registration questions that could not be resolved quickly.

So Mr. Pierce, who had voted regularly since 1989, filled out his paper ballot. Election administrators then proceeded to throw it out, determining that poll workers had Mr. Pierce file it in the wrong precinct.

He was hardly alone. Of the 5,914 provisional ballots cast in the Chicago primary, 5,498 were disqualified, mostly on technical grounds.

Provisional voting, the centerpiece of the Help America Vote Act that Congress passed in 2002, will be put into effect across the nation in the coming presidential election in an effort to ensure that more votes are counted.

But election officials say the experience of Mr. Pierce -- and hundreds like him across the country during primary season -- show how failures in carrying out the measure could end up disenfranchising voters instead.

All but a handful of states have passed legislation creating some form of provisional balloting. Most states adopted the new rules to make a deadline to get federal election money this year.

An examination of those rules, however, shows there is no uniformity in how they are applied. Some states, for example, allow provisional ballots to be counted even if they are filed in the wrong precinct, but at least 16 states, including Illinois, throw them out.

And few states have worked out the details of how to train workers to carry out provisional balloting and other voting changes, setting up the potential for a protracted ballot-by-ballot fight in any election that is close.

''You talk about testing with real bullets, this is going to be testing election reform with real ballots,'' said Doug Chapin, executive director of a nonpartisan election watchdog group, electionline.org.

In the primary in Chicago, one in 90 ballots was provisionally cast. The majority of the 93 percent that were thrown out were disqualified because of technical errors caused by election workers; these included more than 1,200 ballots filed in the wrong precinct. Some 2,400 were discounted because affidavits were incompletely or incorrectly filled out. Only 416 provisional votes were ultimately counted.

The extent of the problems surprised Chicago election officials, who said they had hoped provisional ballots would not be widely used. They blamed inadequate training of poll workers for the high rate of disqualification.

''Training your poll workers gets harder every election,'' said Tom Leach, a spokesman for the Chicago Board of Elections. ''We're laying more and more on the judges, and they're not professionals, they're senior citizens and housewives.''

When poll workers could not find Mr. Pierce on the list in the March primary, he said they made no effort to check whether his voting precinct had been changed.

''Someone floated the idea that if I was not in the book, I ought to vote provisionally,'' Mr. Pierce said. ''They kind of went forward in lockstep with that idea, rather than thinking about it.''

He has lived in the same apartment since the 1980's, but the city had recently redrawn precinct lines, he discovered when he called election officials to see what had happened to his ballot. His new polling place was just 10 feet from where he filed his doomed ballot, at another table in the high school gymnasium that served several voting districts that day.

In the primary, provisional ballot problems were more likely to disenfranchise minority voters in Chicago than white voters, exactly the problem in Florida four years ago that provisional voting was intended to address. In wards that are 80 percent or more minority members, the rate of disqualified ballots was double that of wards that are 80 percent white.

The major races in the primary in Chicago were not close, but the disqualified ballots could have been decisive in three close local races, where they far outnumbered the margin of victory -- re-creating another Florida situation. An incumbent in one race took the matter to court but eventually conceded, citing a lack of money to pursue the case.

Mr. Leach said the city's Board of Elections would install phone lines to help workers navigate the provisional ballot system and gain access to registration rolls for the November election, when the number of voters could double and much more is at stake. Officials have also recorded a training video on provisional ballots and will print detailed maps of the precincts to distribute to its poll workers.

Still, Mr. Leach said he would not encourage provisional balloting.

''We're not going to advertise provisional ballots,'' Mr. Leach said. ''We don't need thousands of these to go through after Election Day. We don't have time.''